The outsourcing of computer services has become increasingly common, given the necessity of utilizing specialized resources in order to efficiently respond to all of a customer's demands. A challenge to outsourcing, however, is finding an appropriate system and method for assessing the value of the computer services which are provided to the customer by the outside source or sources. In the realm of mainframe servers, service providers have applied a “utilization model” which links CPU hours to a billing system. Since a mainframe is generally dedicated exclusively to the tasks of one customer and can readily track its number of hours of CPU operation and report same for billing, the utilization model is rather straightforward. A service provider who supplies usage of a mainframe server can establish a baseline of CPU hours or minutes consumed per month and charge the customer a fixed rate for that number of hours or minutes. Typically, the mainframe provider will additionally establish a “protection band” of a preset number of hours or minutes above and below the baseline, which allows the customer's CPU consumption to vary within the protection band without requiring a billing adjustment. Variation of usage beyond the boundaries of the protection band, whether above or below the stated number of hours, will result in an adjustment of the monthly bill based upon an agreed incremental rate for each hour above or below the boundaries of the protection band.
Due to several factors, the outsourcing of services for servers is not as readily quantified and billed using the above-described utilization model. One factor is that individualized software is necessary to track the consumption hours for each machine. Additionally complicating the tracking aspect is the fact that one provider may have a plurality of servers, each of which could be running on a different software platform which would each require different tracking software. Moreover, given the rapidity of software upgrades for servers, it would be necessary to continually upgrade the tracking software programs as well. The amount of support needed to maintain one or more servers for serving a particular customer can also influence the billing approach. Finally, to be cost effective, a service provider seeks to maximize utilization of server resources, which results in servers doing work for more than one customer, further complicating the task of tracking utilization for billing. If, as often happens, a customer demands that a designated server be used exclusively for the tasks of a particular business unit, a utilization billing scheme is not profitable for the service provider, since a large percentage of the server resources go unused. For billing of small to large server services, the actual usage type and service level must be factored in to make the arrangement both profitable and affordable for the parties involved. In addition to factoring in the usage in the application environment, the service provider should seek to provide some valuation of the necessary support level and of the environmental characteristics, such as system size (measured in capacity units), in order to achieve a realistic valuation.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for measuring and pricing the computer services provided by servers.
It is another object of the invention to establish a server valuation system which can dynamically be adjusted to evaluate service provided by newly developed server hardware and software.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a server valuation system which can be applied to various levels of server size, application complexity and service requirements.